Spiegel’s Mighty Shadow

Lawrence of Arabia . . . The Bridge on the River Kwai . . . On the Waterfront . . . The African Queen ... To know how four of Hollywood’s greatest movies got made is to understand the greatness of the man who produced them. Here, in an excerpt from a new biography, is Sam Spiegel, in all his ruthless, maverick, multiple-Oscar-winning glory.

The Academy Awards, March 26, 1958: there was a hush in the auditorium of the RKO Pantages Theatre as Gary Cooper struggled with the envelope. Cooper paused, broke into one of his shy, charismatic smiles, and announced, “Sam Spiegel for The Bridge on the River Kwai.”

Three years after gaining his first Oscar, as producer of On the Waterfront, Spiegel had won again for best picture. Five years later he would win a third time, for Lawrence of Arabia. All three triumphs were financed by Columbia and led to Spiegel’s becoming the studio’s uncrowned prince. “Uncrowned because it would have been too expensive if he was crowned,” said the producer Charles Schneer. Spiegel remains the sole producer to have won three Academy Awards within eight years.

Spiegel had a face that stood out in a crowd. “In profile, he looked like a Roman emperor,” said director Fred Zinnemann. His black hair was oiled and swept back behind large ears, showing a high forehead and a forceful, prominent nose. The eyebrows, arched more on the right than on the left, indicated a mixture of wisdom and humor, while a sparse line of eyelashes, curled and pushed back to his heavy lids, betrayed a certain old-world vanity and charm. Yet his dark-brown eyes, which usually twinkled, were still that night.

He knew better than to make an awkward rush for the stage. Like a portly eagle preparing for flight, Spiegel murmured something to his beautiful, much younger wife, Betty, and rose sedately. Immaculately dressed, with a white handkerchief in his tuxedo pocket, the 56-year-old producer stood five feet nine, weighed 200 pounds, and was rotund, with short, skinny legs, yet he was noted for his “nutty elegance.”

As he walked to the stage, while the orchestra played the picture’s theme song, “Colonel Bogey March,” Spiegel nervously licked his top lip. But the moment Cooper presented him with the gilded statue, his face creased into its familiar dimples and smile. “The soundstages of Hollywood have been extended in recent years to the farthest corners of the world,” Spiegel began. “No land is inviolate to the glare of our camera. Yet it is fitting and proper that people the world over are waiting for a decision which only you in this community are able to render.” Most award recipients in those days gave one-line speeches, but, as usual, Spiegel—a rogue elephant—set his own tone. Also, typically, the Eastern European producer was awash in intrigue, which that night concerned the authorship of his film’s screenplay.

Pierre Boulle, who had written the novel The Bridge over the River Kwai, on which the picture had been based, was credited, and earlier in the ceremony, when the film won for best screenplay, Kim Novak had collected Boulle’s award. Breathy and mermaid-like in a tight sequined dress, the actress said that her boss the late Harry Cohn was “very proud” of the film.

In fact, when the famous studio head had first heard of the project, which would put Columbia back in the black, he picked up the telephone and shouted, “How can you idiots in the New York office give a crook like Sam Spiegel $2 million and let him go to some place like Ceylon?” Nevertheless, the burning question in many people’s minds that night was “How could a Frenchman have written this script?” A month before the Oscars, gossip columnists, including Hedda Hopper, had ban-died about the names of two blacklisted writers, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson. Was it just a coincidence that the theme music from High Noon was played at Coo-per’s entrance? High Noon had earned the actor his last Oscar, but it was also the last script Foreman had been credited for before becoming a victim of the McCarthy era.

Backstage, speculation soared. When asked about the screenplay, David Lean, who directed the film, admitted that an American writer had worked on it, but declined to mention his name. Spiegel, however, continued to lie through his teeth, insisting to all the newspapers that “neither Michael Wilson nor anyone else worked on our version.” Boulle had been credited, he said, “because it was taken directly from his contribution—the book.” Spiegel’s behavior may seem shocking and has become one of the many black marks held against him, but he had his reasons for being careful. Columbia Studios refused to have anything to do with a blacklisted writer, and any mention of Foreman or Wilson would have threatened the film’s release.

Spiegel was well attuned to the ways of Hollywood. He claimed to loathe the town, dismissing it as “a factory in the sun,” but he had spent 12 years living there, and he knew the studio system. It had taken time for Spiegel to prove himself professionally. He was a late, late bloomer, at least 20 years behind his fellow émigrés, who included directors Anatole Litvak, Otto Preminger, and Billy Wilder. According to Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who directed Suddenly, Last Summer for Spiegel, he was the “perfect example of the producer who walked in without a penny and made himself into something ... and made increasingly better films as he became wealthier.”

In Spiegel’s opinion, there were no rules for his profession. “It’s really a negative that makes you a success,” he remarked. His maverick attitude allowed him to manage his onetime partner John Huston and work with other equally demanding but gifted directors, including Julien Duvivier, Orson Welles, Joseph Losey, Elia Kazan, and Arthur Penn, as well as Lean and Mankiewicz. In total, he made 20 films, and while not all of them were successes, the best were to make up the pride of the Spiegel legacy: The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lawrence of Arabia.

Spiegel could be accused of sharklike behavior and an appalling ruthlessness, but he was also recognized for his exquisite manners and his kleine Aufmerksamkeit, a German expression meaning the little gesture or courtesy. He had such an aversion to honoring financial agreements that Billy Wilder called him “a modern-day Rob-in Hood, who steals from the rich and steals from the poor.” Sometimes, the tales concerning the producer were exaggerated, or just plain apocryphal, but he rarely corrected what he heard. As the last of the great showmen, he recognized the power of myth.

By the end of his life, Spiegel’s pictures had collected 35 Oscars. He had made millions, acquired a priceless art collection, and entertained some of the most glamorous people of the 20th century, including Gianni and Marella Agnelli, King Farouk, Greta Garbo, Sir James Goldsmith, Jackie Onassis, and Babe Paley.

Yet Spiegel, whom Arthur Miller once called “the Great Gatsby,” never lost his air of mystery. When asked about his birthplace by Annette Hohenlohe, an Austrian aristocrat, Spiegel replied, “I can’t remember.” The producer had a few stories that harked back to a different era: his escape on the last train from Berlin when Hitler came to power, for instance, or his escape from Vienna with Otto Preminger. The first was true, and the second was a bit exaggerated, but both stories gave credence to Spiegel’s much-repeated remark, “But for the grace of God, I would have been a lampshade.”

Though he liked to say that he was from Vienna, Spiegel was born in the Galicia region (now part of Poland) to a family of highly educated middle-class Jews in 1901. An avid Zionist, he left in 1920 for Palestine, where he met his first wife, Rachel “Ray” Agranovich, with whom he had a daughter, Alisa. In 1927, Spiegel walked out on his wife and daughter and sailed for the United States, predicting, “I’ll either become a very rich and famous man or I’ll die like a dog in the gutter.” The following year, he was arrested by the Secret Service in Los Angeles and jailed on charges of illegal immigration and falsifying checks. In 1930, after a brief stint at MGM, he was deported to Poland. Over the next decade, he would hop from city to city, running into trouble with the law everywhere he went, but also producing movies in Berlin, Vienna, and London and forging connections in the international film community. In 1939 he illegally re-entered the United States from Mexico and settled in Los Angeles.

In 1941, while making his first Hollywood film, Tales of Manhattan, Spiegel took the advice of Darryl Zanuck and changed his name, adopting the nom de plume S. P. Eagle, to the amusement of many. (One executive at Fox would address memos to E. A. Gull.) The next year, Spiegel moved to 702 North Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills, where he became a celebrated, even infamous, host.

Much was made of the female company that was found at North Crescent Drive. Orson Welles referred to the prostitutes he met there, and Marilyn Monroe was known to be one of the house “gals.” In her memoirs, the actress Evelyn Keyes, John Huston’s third wife, mentioned seeing Monroe at Spiegel’s, and it is possible that Spiegel introduced Monroe to her mentor, the agent Johnny Hyde, who was a close friend of the producer’s.

Spiegel was friendly with all the studio talent scouts, and word soon circulated that his home was a good place to meet people in the business. “He was an inspired pimp,” said the writer Budd Schulberg. “He could create those very high-class mosh pits. Women were looking for acting jobs and it was a knee up the ladder.” The regular gin-rummy players at his house—Wilder, Kazan, Mankiewicz, Preminger, and occasionally Mervyn LeRoy—were quite a group for an aspiring actress to meet. There were also the agents: Charles Feldman, Kurt Frings, and Paul Kohner. According to Kazan, an upstairs bedroom was at his “disposal any afternoon when I had no other accommodation to take advantage of a sudden piece of social good fortune.”

By 1944, Spiegel’s house had become the place to be seen on December 31. “He asked everyone,” recalled the writer Leonora Hornblow. “Film-studio heads, stars, starlets (which is a euphemism), and writers. Sam liked writers, and at the time writers were way down.” In 1948 alone, the guests included Lucille Ball, Charles and Oona Chaplin, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Cary Grant, Danny Kaye, James Mason, Sir Charles and Lady Mendl, Judy Garland and Vincente Minnelli, George Sanders, Shirley Temple, Darryl and Virginia Zanuck, as well as rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella O. Parsons.

Charles Feldman took Lauren Bacall one year. “It was the first time that I saw Howard Hughes,” she remembered. There was a story about Hughes and the party. Apparently, Hughes had heard that Spiegel was broke and couldn’t pay for it, so the eccentric billionaire offered to help out. Supposedly, Spiegel turned him down, saying, “It just would not be the same.” The story seems unlikely: Spiegel never had money when he threw a party, and he had never been known to refuse financial assistance.

According to writer Eric Ambler, the husband of producer-writer Joan Harrison, the parties always ended the same way. “It would be the early hours of the morning and Abbey Rents—whom Sam had rented the glasses and tables from—would turn up wanting all their stuff back, as well as a check. The latter was always the difficulty.”

Another year, Humphrey Bogart was dancing with Bacall when a sailor pinched her ass. Apoplectic with rage, the actor immediately seized the offender and two others from the navy and locked them in the lavatory while he reported them to the shore patrol. “That was him, the hero of Casablanca!” recalled Billy Wilder.

The parties made Spiegel a Hollywood celebrity. His guests, in turn, invited him to their parties, according to Hornblow. “It was deliberate, but no one ever said that Sam wasn’t smart.” But the producer had grander ambitions. According to director Lewis Milestone, “Sam was always scared that he would only be remembered for his New Year’s Eve parties.”

On December 8, 1947, Spiegel stunned the film community by forming Horizon Pictures with John Huston, who was hot off the success of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. “Huston was a genius, Spiegel was not,” said Lauren Bacall, echoing the sentiments of many at the time. Horizon’s first few pictures came and went without generating much excitement or money, but the partners’ fourth film, the second to be directed by Huston, became a sensation.

Spiegel was so enthusiastic about The African Queen that he even tempted fate by bragging to Lillian Ross, “It will give John the kind of commercial hit he had when he made The Maltese Falcon in 1941.” Set in Africa at the beginning of World War I, the film follows a proper English lady missionary, Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn), and a gin-soaked Canadian riverboat captain, Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart), who are thrown together on Allnut’s boat, The African Queen, after the Germans burn down Sayer’s mission.

The African Queen was to be a major Spiegel production, even though he was sharing the costs with the British production company Romulus Films, which was paying for the supporting actors, the technicians, and the expenses involved with the African locations. When Spiegel’s financing for the director and the leading players fell through in April 1951, however, Hepburn refused to budge from Hollywood without an assurance from her agent that moneys were forthcoming. Spiegel immediately cabled her: I HAVE JUST RETURNED FROM AFRICA WHERE JOHN REMAINED WITH ENTIRE TECHNICAL STAFF BUSILY BUILDING BOATS FOR AFRICAN QUEEN. Claiming to be IN SHOCK THAT LAWYERS STILL HAGGLING OVER WORDING OF GUARANTEE BETWEEN LONDON AND LOS ANGELES, he urged her to sail the following day, AS DELAYS IN GUARANTEES PURELY OBSTINACY OF LAWYERS . . . WILL BE SETTLED LONG BEFORE YOU ARRIVE . . . PLEASE CABLE ME CLARIDGES.

In true Spiegel style, he wanted Hepburn to think that he was staying at one of London’s most expensive hotels, when he was actually living in a rented apartment nearby, in Grosvenor Square. In the meantime, his partner had not been paid since mid-January 1951, and his employees in the United States were being threatened with eviction and the disconnection of the office telephone. But such news had never stopped Spiegel from sleeping at night. Indeed, he was eating hearty three-course meals, playing cards, and dancing the rumba, while, it was said, girls were “coming in the front door and coming out of the back door.” He was clearly relieved to be back in Europe and away from his second wife, Lynne Ruth Baggett, whom he had married in May 1948. (She had stayed in Hollywood.) The only thing nagging at Spiegel was Huston, who refused to concentrate on the screenplay.

“John was only interested in killing an elephant,” said Peter Viertel, who had been enlisted to co-write the ending and add dialogue. “Poor old Sam, he believed in The African Queen much more than John did.”

Spiegel sensed a certain coldness in his partner. “He seems to hate me for some unknown reason,” he admitted to Viertel. Was it the fact that Huston hadn’t been paid for several weeks? Whenever Huston could disgrace his partner, he did. At one lunch, the director was giving a speech when he noticed that Spiegel had already started on his first course. Huston stopped mid-sentence and said, “I’ll wait until my partner has finished going down on the asparagus and then proceed.” On another occasion, Huston made a reference to Spiegel’s time in Brixton Prison in England, where he had been jailed in 1936 for forging a guarantee allowing him to obtain funds.

However, there was a truce after Huston confronted his partner on some bare-faced falsehood and Spiegel replied, “If I hadn’t lied, I would now be a bar of soap.” The director was amused, but then he left for Africa and forgot to take a copy of the screenplay with him. “I’m hooked up with a madman,” a penniless Spiegel declared as he and Viertel rode back from the airport in the producer’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.

Spiegel arrived in the Congo on May 20, 1951. According to Lauren Bacall, who accompanied Bogart, he looked “quite a sight” with his “dead-white skin in safari shirt, shorts, and kneesocks, with a regular hat.” Viertel had a different impression. “Sam wanted to be in Africa as much as he wanted to be shot to the moon,” he recalled. “He had absolutely no taste for that, but he really took charge. He was on death row and he had to function. Without him, we would never have made the movie.”

To arrive at the first location, the crew had to board a wooden train. “It would set itself alight every three or four yards,” said Angela Allen, the film’s “continuity lady.” “And you were bitten from ear to ankle by anything that happened to be flying around.” Hepburn sat with Spiegel, who was sweating profusely. “And he kept on mopping it up and taking showers,” the actress wrote in her memoir.

Only Hepburn took to the forbidding climate and terrain. “What divine natives! What divine morning glories!” she gushed as her nimble figure slipped in and out of the lush undergrowth. Nevertheless, she insisted on having her own lavatory, which was nicknamed the Queen’s Throne by the natives. “It used to drive everyone mad because it was yet another piece to add to the floating flotilla,” said Allen.

When the shoot moved to Uganda, Spiegel arranged for the entire unit to live on board Lugard II, a houseboat that had previously been used by the crew of King Solomon’s Mines. However, although the cabins were comfortable, the water filters were clogged, so the water drinkers of the group swallowed every conceivable tropical microbe. Apart from Bogart and Huston, who drank only whiskey—it was said that they shaved with the stuff—nearly all the crew came down with either malaria or dysentery. For the opening scene in the church, in which Hepburn sings and plays the organ, a bucket had to be kept nearby so that she could vomit between takes. “I was concerned about her skin looking green in Technicolor,” said the cinematographer, Jack Cardiff.

During the height of the sickness, Spiegel flew in. “Huston started to foam at the mouth. ‘If you don’t get these people water, I’m going to shut down the movie,’” Bacall remembered. “John was ready to kill him.”

Back in Europe, Spiegel took full advantage of the cast’s remote location. For example, when one of his backers gave him $50,000, $43,000 of which was intended for Huston, Spiegel instead put the sum toward his outstanding U.S. income-tax bill of $57,043.85. It was an act of appalling selfishness: Huston’s young wife was expecting their second child, Anjelica, in early July 1951. Stalling payment, then giving only 50 percent of the promised amount after considerable threats, typified Spiegel’s behavior during the making of The African Queen. “Don’t ask and don’t tell: that was the way Sam operated,” said Albert Heit, his New York lawyer. “If you didn’t ask, you didn’t get your money.”

By the time production was completed, on November 1, a certain amount of bad blood had built up between Spiegel and his partner. In Spiegel’s opinion, there had been too many instances when Huston was not paying attention. This had led to numerous shouting matches. Much later, Huston admitted that, despite their battles, Spiegel was the best producer that he ever had. “He just had two big weaknesses: money and women.”

When the producer returned to Los Angeles with the reels of The African Queen in time for that year’s Oscar derby, he was greeted like a hero. The trade papers had picked up on his mad rush, and it became public knowledge that the cans of film had gone through a storm over the Atlantic and a customs holdup in Boston before arriving in Hollywood on Wednesday, December 19, 1951. “Meanwhile, everyone here is proceeding calmly, as if the print had been in the vaults for months,” Daily Variety cracked. The picture, which cost Horizon $729,219.48 and Romulus £248,000, was viewed as a “true dark horse,” but it struck gold at the box office, earning $4.3 million in first release.

Spiegel had proved his fellow producers wrong, particularly Sir Alexander Korda, who had said, “A story of two old people going up and down an African river.... Who’s going to be interested in that? You’ll be bankrupt.”

In July 1953, Spiegel’s house on North Crescent Drive was off-limits to him for two reasons: first, he was scared of being arrested there (as always, he had a number of unpaid debts), and, second, it had been royally messed up by Lynne, whom he had sued for divorce in October. Armed with a pair of scissors, she had gone to work on his suits, his underpants, and even some of his paintings, which, according to Spiegel, included six Picassos. She also smashed every mirror and glass in the house.

As a result, he checked into the nearby Beverly Hills Hotel, in a suite opposite Elia Kazan and the writer Budd Schulberg, whose project The Golden Warrior—it would later be renamed On the Waterfront—had been refused by every studio. (“Who’s going to care about a lot of sweaty longshoremen?,” Darryl Zanuck had asked them.) One day, Spiegel appeared at their door, “smart as paint” and smelling of crushed lilacs. “Are you boys in trouble?” he asked. They told him about their pre-dicament. “He said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and to my surprise, he did it right away,” recalled Kazan. The next morning, Spiegel left for New York with the screenplay of The Golden Warrior in his briefcase. Then he sold Columbia on the film.

“On the Waterfront wouldn’t have been made without Sam, and that’s a pretty positive thing to say about someone,” said Kazan. When Kazan’s agent heard about Spiegel’s involvement, he laughed. “Watch out for him!” he warned. “He’s got moves that you’ve never seen before.”

Set on the docks of Hoboken, New Jersey, On the Waterfront tells how Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), the errand boy for crooked union boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), joins the fight against corruption. The stellar cast included Eva Marie Saint as Terry’s girlfriend, Karl Malden as a crusading priest, and Rod Steiger as Terry’s corrupted brother.

During their screenplay conferences at the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan, Schulberg became increasingly frustrated with Spiegel, whose “tricky ways” pushed him to the end of his tether. “It was just deep in his psyche to conspire and play one [person] against the other,” Schulberg said. Each time Schulberg went to the bathroom, he returned to find Buddha—the director’s name for Spiegel—whispering in Kazan’s ear. “Well, after about the eighth or ninth time, I blew up. I said, ‘What the fuck are you two guys whispering about? What secret can you have that you don’t want me to know about?’” After this outburst, Kazan took him for a walk around the block. “Gadg [the director’s nickname, short for “gadget”] apologized and said, ‘It’s absolutely true, every time you leave the room, Sam comes over and starts to whisper in my ear, and almost all the time it’s nothing that can’t be said in front of you.’ But he’d say, ‘You have to remember this: nobody in Hollywood would do our picture. He did bail us out.’”

Schulberg’s fury with Spiegel nonetheless led to an incident that has since become part of Hollywood lore and has been incorrectly attributed to Irwin Shaw. At 3:30 one morning, the writer was discovered shaving by his wife. When she asked what he was doing up at that hour, Schulberg replied, “I’m driving to New York ... to kill Sam Spiegel.”

In direct contrast to the blacklisted artists whom Spiegel had worked with, including Arthur Laurents, Dalton Trumbo, and Lewis Milestone (who was graylisted), both Schulberg and Kazan had “named names” during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Their cooperation with the McCarthy witch-hunt cast a shadow on both their lives, and some critics have speculated that On the Waterfront was a personal apology for informing. Schulberg, however, dismissed the idea as “insanity” and “unfair to the theme of the picture.” “It would be hard to imagine Kazan coming up to me and saying, ‘Budd, I would like to make a movie which justifies my testimony.’”

When they initially approached Marlon Brando, whom Kazan had mentored, first directing him in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, the actor rejected the part. “Marlon was going through a period when he felt very badly about Kazan testifying,” said Jay Kanter, the actor’s agent. Schulberg and Spiegel were at Kazan’s house when Brando turned down the picture. It was August 1953. After a brief conference, Frank Sinatra was contacted. “We had a handshake agreement,” Schulberg recalled.

But Spiegel never gave up on Brando. “Marlon never liked to work to begin with,” said Kanter. “He was always looking for ways to avoid it.” And while Sinatra was being measured for his costume, or so Schulberg remembered, Brando’s father contacted Kanter. He was insistent that his son work. “He said, ‘Isn’t there anything that you feel that he should do?,’” Kanter recalled. “Of course, at the time, people were chasing Marlon to do everything and anything. He was the top of the heap as far as the young stars of that period.” Schulberg’s screenplay was mentioned again. “Marlon said no, but asked if it had been cast.” Kanter then rang Spiegel. At the time, Brando was living in Room 867 in the Carnegie Hall apartment block, on West 57th Street. “We walked over to Spiegel’s suite,” Kanter said. “I left the two of them together.”

Later, according to legend, Spiegel was at the Stage Delicatessen on Seventh Avenue when Brando wandered in off the street at three A.M. Spiegel then allegedly called Kazan and persuaded him to join them. During the meeting Spiegel supposedly turned to Brando and said, “Politics has nothing to do with this—it’s about your talent, it’s about your career.” He may easily have said this, but it would have been unlike Spiegel to be haunting a deli at that time for no good reason.

During the filming, which lasted from mid-November of 1953 until early January of the following year, Kazan received word that Spiegel was upset about his being behind schedule. “Gadg went mad,” said Schulberg. “‘That son of a bitch, I’m not going to let him near the set.’ So I said, ‘Just remember one thing, Sam Spiegel was the only one ... ’ and Gadg said, ‘Oh, Christ, all right.’” Spiegel then began phoning Schulberg at three and four in the morning, because Kazan refused to speak to him. “Sam would call to say, ‘Budd, this is serious.... We are going to run out of money. You have got to make Gadg go faster.’”

Although Spiegel was constantly interfering, causing dissension and disruption, physically he kept his distance. He preferred whooping it up at the ‘21’ Club or the Stork Club and then making the occasional grand appearance with a blonde in tow. One night the crew, who had been working all day on the Hoboken docks in the bitter cold, started to mutiny. “Charlie Maguire [the first assistant director] telephoned Sam, who had been at the ‘21’ Club,” recalled Schulberg. (Kazan said it was the Stork Club.) “It was a marvelous scene, straight out of a movie, and he came out in his limo, in his camel-hair coat, his alligator shoes. These guys were freezing, exhausted, and furious. He started to make a speech. ‘I thought of you as professional and I cannot have anything happen on the set. You have got to fulfill your obligations. Am I making myself clear?’ In that wonderful accent, but making this impassioned speech.”

The exhausting shoot lasted 35 days. Neither Kazan nor Spiegel knew that it was going to be a classic. When he first saw the film, Brando was “so depressed” by his performance that he got up and left the screening room. “I thought I was a huge failure,” he later wrote. Kazan was deeply hurt. “Not a word, not even a good-bye,” he recalled. Moments later, hearing Spiegel’s apologetic tone with Leonard Bernstein, who was composing the score, Kazan shouted out, “This is a great picture!”

On the Waterfront went on to collect eight Oscars, including those for best screen-play, best director, best actor, best actress in a supporting role, and best picture. Spiegel was spared accepting the award as S. P. Eagle, thanks to Kazan, who advised him to “put his right name on the picture.” “I told Gadge [sic], Mr. Eagle had just died very happily,” the producer told The New York Times.

Sam Spiegel used to say that he fell upon Pierre Boulle’s Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï (The Bridge over the River Kwaï) when his flight had been delayed in Paris. He was so “gripped by the story line” that he immediately made inquiries about the film rights. Henri-Georges Clou-zot had been the first to option the best-selling novel. Yet when the renowned French director ran into trouble finding a producer, Carl Foreman entered the scene. Initially, the American screenwriter had the backing of Sir Alexander Korda, on the understanding that his brother Zoltan would direct. However, when Alexander had financial setbacks and Zoltan’s health declined, Spiegel barged in. Again,

Columbia was enlisted to fund the picture. Since Foreman was blacklisted and the studio was nervous about artists with a former Communist connection, Spiegel referred to him only as “Zoltan’s partner.”

The director Howard Hawks suggested to Spiegel that he use a British cast and an all-British crew, advice that may have prompted Spiegel to send the book to David Lean, the director of such English classics as Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and Hobson’s Choice. Lean was working on Summertime with Katharine Hepburn, and the actress strongly recommended Spiegel, saying, “You’ll learn a lot from him. And he’ll learn a lot from you.”

Set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp deep in the Burmese jungle, the film concerns the captured British officer Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), who makes a heroic stand against the camp’s tyrannical commander, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), but then loses his grip. Nicholson agrees to direct the exhausted P.O.W.’s under his command in building a railway bridge that will be a considerable help to the Japanese war effort. Meanwhile, a commando team including an American named Shears (William Holden) arrives on a mission to blow up the bridge.

Lean recalled being “thoroughly seduced” by Spiegel’s huge personality and intelligence at their first meeting. Spiegel declared that he had “a magnificent script” by Carl Foreman, but Lean was thoroughly disappointed by the first draft when he read it. Lean had liked Boulle’s book, describing it as having “real size and style,” but after reading Foreman’s screenplay he sensed that the “whole spirit of the book” had been lost. When Lean first voiced his opinion about the screenplay, Spiegel allegedly turned white.

In the six weeks that followed, Lean and his onetime associate producer Norman Spencer toiled on a film treatment at the Hotel Fourteen on East 60th Street, where the director thought of the opening sequence—the soldiers whistling the “Colonel Bogey March” on their arrival at the prisoner-of-war camp. Throughout, they had script conferences with Spiegel, who, in Spencer’s estimation, was “often brilliant.” “Sam had this ability to put his finger on what was wrong.... He was very focused and wouldn’t forget the original intention.” Spencer was amused by Spiegel’s two maxims: “‘Always turn your liabilities into assets,’ and ‘I’m not interested in your efforts; I am only interested in your results.’”

At Spiegel’s insistence, Lean took Foreman with him to Ceylon, but the two men were incapable of getting on. Finally, Spiegel replaced Foreman with Michael Wilson, at Foreman’s own suggestion. Though he was blacklisted and lived in Paris, Wilson had continued to write for Hollywood, and his uncredited screenplay for Friendly Persuasion was nominated for an Oscar in 1956*.*

Spiegel and Wilson arrived in Ceylon on September 9, 1956, and Lean’s outlook immediately improved. “It was really Mike’s and my script,” he later said. Wilson, who received $10,000 for his polish, was forced to write under the name John Michael.

Alec Guinness was said to have turned down the role of Nicholson three times. Finally, in late autumn, Spiegel took Guinness out to dinner. “He was a very persuasive character,” the actor recalled. “I started out maintaining that I wouldn’t play the role, and by the end of the evening, we were discussing what kind of wig I would wear.”

By contrast, there was a scramble over the role of Shears. Cary Grant had accepted the role immediately. “Fortunately or unfortunately, by that time Holden had accepted it as well,” the producer wrote to Lean. “I was in a most embarrassing position with Cary who was most eager to play it.... He was absolutely broken-hearted. He cried actual tears when notified.” Grant even approached Holden directly, begging him to withdraw. Naturally, the circumstances thrilled Spiegel, who concluded, “All this, as sad as it is, because of Cary’s hurt feelings, should be very cheering to us as indicating the effect that this script has on two intelligent actors.”

Guinness and Lean clashed almost immediately, and Spiegel was called upon to act as intermediary. “Guinness had an entirely different concept of the part than David and I,” Spiegel recalled. The actor was trying to inject tongue-in-cheek humor into his lines. “I totally agreed with David, that it would be disastrous.” Both producer and director saw Nicholson as a tragic, misled character who had to be “made understandable” to an audience.

At one point, Lean was so frustrated by the actor that tears started to roll down his cheeks. “I tried to calm him,” Spiegel said. “We had dinner together ... and I went to Alec that same night ... and I don’t think that I’ve ever been so indignant with an actor.... I screamed, I really told him that what he was doing was destroying the director and the picture.” The following day, Spiegel joined them on the bridge, where they were shooting a scene. “He [David] was still under the impact of the previous night, so I had to get on the set with him, and I kind of mediated between the two of them and referred David’s instructions to Alec and Alec’s instructions to David for a good hour until they started communicating directly with each other.”

Guinness’s temper tended to be particularly short after filming with Sessue Hayakawa. The distinguished Japanese ac-tor, who had had a career in Hollywood, was getting old and had lost his grasp of English. “He says ‘yes’ all the time,” wrote Lean. Hayakawa, who would warm up after a few takes, was also of the “Hollywood-starlet school of script reading”—he read only his own lines. Adding to the problems was the potion that Hayakawa used for his bloodshot eyes. “The liquid clears his eyes ... but halfway through the scene, it comes streaming from his nose.” Unfortunately, this tended to happen at the very moment that Guinness had found his pace.

After dinner one night, Lean and Spiegel took a stroll by the ocean. Out of nowhere, three youths appeared, and one of them, to the director’s horror, began running his knife up and down Spiegel’s back. “I said, ‘Put that knife away,’ and Sam said, ‘What are you saying?’ ... I said, ‘This man’s got a knife at your back,’ and it was as if 10 feet of film had been cut out.... I could hear Sam gulp even with the sea in the distance. And I turned round and I said, ‘Look, just fuck off.’” Both men were terrified, but as soon as the youth put the knife down, Spiegel began to roar and retaliate. “He stuck his hand in his trouser pocket, stuck a finger out, and said, ‘I’m now going to shoot you full of bullets, the shit will just pour out of you onto the grass,’ and a whole string of obscenities, actually,” Lean recalled. Eventually, the director guided Spiegel back to his hotel. “The next thing I knew he was yelling at the concierge over the desk and saying there were a gang of men, murderers, out there with knives and guns, and I don’t know what they hadn’t got by the time Sam had finished.”

The first attempt to blow up the bridge was a complete fiasco. It had been promoted as a huge event, and Spiegel invited local dignitaries who had helped with the production. The prime minister of Ceylon, Solomon Bandaranaike, headed the band of 100 invitees. Spiegel, Lean, and the explosives expert gathered in a hut where there was a panel with lights that lit up when each of the five camera operators switched on his camera to film the bridge. The train started, and, one by one, the lights went on until the last, which stayed dark. Lean had to make up his mind: allow the explosion to go off and risk the life of the cameraman or abort the operation. “Don’t blow up the bridge!” he cried. The train crossed the bridge, tore through the sand dragon—the pile of sand that had been put there as a precautionary measure—and went into the London bus that contained the generator.

Lean’s gallant gesture of buying dinner for the offending cameraman, who had simply forgotten to turn his camera on, infuriated Spiegel. “You can’t take the biggest idiot to dinner to congratulate him for fucking up the scene,” he complained.

Due to Lean’s complicated tax situation, the picture was cut in Paris. He was staying at the Queen Elizabeth, while Spiegel was at the George V. There were stories of Spiegel gallivanting around town and having endless parties, but he was also deeply involved in the editing. “I had quarrels with David in the cutting room because he wanted to cut too much,” he recalled.

The producer had promised to have a print ready by September and—much to Lean’s amazement—he delivered. Lean’s tax problems prevented him from attending the opening, but Spiegel’s office had kept him abreast of all the action. “I have seen the advert in the Sunday Times. What a size! All the same, they’ve gone a bit far haven’t they?,” Lean wrote to the producer. A month after the film had come out, it was still playing to full houses at the Plaza Theatre in London.

But after the excitement of the film’s success, the director’s letters and telegrams began to include gripes about two issues: the bogus screenplay credit for Pierre Boulle and the fact that “A Sam Spiegel Production” was looming over all the other titles. According to Kevin Brownlow, Lean’s principal biographer, “Lean had never had worse billing, even in his early days.” Spiegel’s need to have his name above the title, which had also caused Kazan and Schulberg to complain bitterly after the release of On the Waterfront, was essential to his image as a producer. It was the emperor’s stamp, showing that he was above the cast and crew.

Even the studio was shocked by Spiegel’s megalomania. Somewhat outrageously, he had tried to limit mention of Columbia to the trademark at the beginning of the film. In the end, several studio executives objected and rectified the situation.

The producer won his second Academy Award for The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Lean won his first. In total, their picture brought in seven Oscars, including that for best actor for Alec Guinness. There was every reason to rejoice—the sparring partners had scored—but Lean could not resist irritating Spiegel. When a journalist held a microphone under his nose and asked who really wrote the script, Lean replied, “You’re asking the $64,000 question, and as you have not got $64,000 I’m not prepared to tell you.” The radio stations quickly picked up the remark. “Sam went berserk,” Lean wrote. “I remember standing outside the theatre after the Oscar ceremony with Sam holding his Oscar for best picture and shaking it at me in fury. I shouting back at him, brandishing mine. It was a ridiculous scene.”

Betty Spiegel, the producer’s third wife, was unaware of the incident. “I was in a slight stupor from the boredom of the event,” she recalled. “Best picture was last on the bill. During the ceremony, I had been thinking 3,000 things. How I would console Sam if he didn’t win the Oscar, and how I would deal with him if he did. It was a double-edged sword.”

Lawrence of Arabia took 23 months to make, cost $14 million (five times the projected budget), and was such an enormous directorial task that there was a crucial change in the billing: this time, David Lean’s name joined Sam Spiegel’s above the title.

The film tells the story of T. E. Lawrence, the British intelligence officer and adventurer, and his extraordinary campaign in the Arabian Desert during World War I, in which he led a coalition of Arab tribes in a successful assault on the Axis-aligned Ottoman Turks.

When asked by Betty if he had read Seven Pillars of Wisdom—Lawrence’s account of the Arab revolt, as well as a considerable amount of background history—Spiegel’s answer had been surprising: “Of course not, baby. Who could sit down and really read it?” It was unlike the producer not to do his homework, and this was one of the first signs that his success had made him a little dilettantish.

Once again Columbia was backing the picture. A steady two-year campaign was engineered to educate Americans about Lawrence—a very British hero. Writers such as Alistair MacLean were commissioned to write books on Lawrence of Arabia, white terry-cloth robes with hoods were manufactured for children, and Lawrence’s face was engraved on Bonbons Gilbert coffee candy.

Just as a new chapter in Spiegel’s life was opening with Lawrence of Arabia, another abruptly closed when his second wife, Lynne, took her life with an overdose of sleeping pills on March 22, 1960. It was her second attempt. “Sam seemed to shrug it off and get on his merry way—planning evenings at the theater, reading scripts, and taking trips to Europe,” Betty Spiegel said. “He didn’t like things that were unpleasant or depressing—illness or hospitals—and he didn’t like Lynne.” Spiegel did not attend the funeral. There was even talk that he had refused to pay for the service, though, in fact, he did pick up the bill.

To find his Lawrence, Lean needed to see several films each day. Eventually, an actor portraying a feckless young man in a film called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England caught Lean’s attention. Peter O’Toole was 27 years old and proud to be Irish, although he had been brought up in Leeds. The actor signed a five-picture deal with Horizon and had a nose job to improve his screen appearance.

Anthony Nutting was hired as the picture’s “Oriental Counselor.” A former British minister of state for foreign affairs who resigned in 1956 over the Suez conflict, he was an inspired choice, and in all the negotiations with Arab interests he became Spiegel’s trump card.

By the end of 1960, King Hussein—the great-nephew of Prince Faisal, played in the film by Alec Guinness—had given his blessing to having the film shot in Jordan. Spiegel was terrified of filming in an Arab country. According to Nutting, for the first half of the filming “he thought he was going to be poisoned intention-ally,” and during the second half “he thought he was going to be poisoned accidentally.” But, true to his motto, he turned the liability into an asset. He insisted that a boat be included in *Lawrence of Arabia’*s production costs so that he would never have to sleep on Arab soil, arguing that it was “perfect for script sessions, as well as entertaining.”

Spiegel had acquired Malahne in the autumn of 1960. Several months earlier, Billy Wilder and director Robert Parrish had gone with him to see the 165-foot-long twin-screw motor yacht, designed by Charles E. Nicholson for Camper & Nicholsons and built in 1937. After talking to the crew, Wilder took the producer aside and said, “Nobody can afford a boat this size anymore, Sam. You must be going crazy.” Spiegel replied, “Don’t be so plebeian, Billy.”

The yacht was in Spiegel’s possession for 23 years and, according to Faye Dunaway, was his “true love.” “Sam became very English when he pronounced the word ‘boat,’” said the producer George Stevens Jr. Columbia chartered it from Spiegel during the filming of Lawrence of Arabia and picked up the expenses, which were so astronomical that members of the boat community used to joke that Spiegel had charged the studio the full purchase price of Malahne as a charter fee.

Spiegel greatly preferred sleeping in his own berth to risking a night in Jordan. He was so petrified that, when he stayed in the king’s summer palace in ’Aqaba, he insisted that Lean share his bedroom. Before turning the lights out, Lean opened the French windows for a view of the bay. Spiegel, who was then in bed, asked where Israel was. “I’m not sure, Sam, but I think it’s over there,” he replied, pointing into the dead of night. “Don’t point, they’ll shoot!” the producer cried out.

Spiegel had initially spotted Omar Sharif, who was brought in to replace the French actor Maurice Ronet in the role of Sherif Ali, in an Arabic-language Egyptian film with French subtitles. “He was really quite first rate,” Spiegel wrote to Lean, “and while committed to half a dozen Egyptian pictures, some of which are being made by his own company, he is willing to chuck them all if we have a good part for him.”

Sharif arrived on the set in June and quickly became friendly with O’Toole. “‘Omar Sharif. No one in the world is called Omar Sharif,’ Peter said at our first meeting,” Sharif recalled. “‘Your name must be Fred.’” After that, Sharif was known on the set as “Cairo Fred.”

Throughout the filming, the cast and crew would work for 21 days straight and then have 3 days off. “Some people went to Jerusalem ... others Amman. We went to Beirut,” said Sharif. At the time, the capital of Lebanon was a thriving, cosmopolitan city, known as “the sin city of the East.” “The company gave Peter and I a little plane to visit the fleshpots. It was fun, except we were drunk from beginning to end—we would start on the plane and by the time we got there, we were out of it. We would take Dexedrine pills to keep awake. Neither of us wanted to waste time.”

After seeing the first batch of rushes, Spiegel immediately congratulated Lean and his team. “I really felt that Peter sounded like a true Lawrence, who will be understood and appreciated both in England and America and I also thought that the photography of the night shot was absolutely the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen,” he wrote. “For the first time, I felt I was not just seeing pretty scenery but began to realize a little of the heart of our story.” However, despite the praise, telegrams began to pour out of Spiegel’s Dover Street office in London that the production had to pick up the pace or else. The threats increased when Robert Bolt, the film’s credited screen-writer, who is best known for his play A Man for All Seasons, told London’s Sunday Times that life on Lean’s set was “a continual clash of egomaniacal monsters wasting more energy than dinosaurs and pouring rivers of money into the sand.”

Lean was furious that Spiegel wanted him to hurry up and get out of Jordan. The director had fallen in love with the desert valley of Wadi Rum, as had the rest of his crew. It was more grand and romantic than the other locations in Jordan, which included Jebel Tubeiq and Al Jafr. When Nutting arrived on the set, there had just been a sandstorm. The first person he saw was Lean, who was caked in dust. “It looked as if he’d been with a makeup artist who’d really laid it on thick,” he said. “So I said, ‘Well, what do you think of my desert now?’ I thought there was going to be an almighty explosion.” But the director replied, “Anthony, everything you said was an understatement.” In Nutting’s opinion, it was yet “another Englishman going potty in the desert.”

Taking this into account, Spiegel had good reason to be nervous. “Spiegel was quite convinced that if he didn’t pull the rug from under his [Lean’s] feet he would be there till now shooting pretty pictures,” said Roy Stevens, Lean’s first assistant director. In September 1961, Lean finally finished the Jordan shoot and agreed to leave the desert, but he remained convinced that it was a mistake to go to Spain, and felt it had everything to do with too many Hollywood dollars going into Arab hands.

By late May 1962, Spiegel and Lean were at war. The producer, convinced that his partner was going too slowly, had fixed the New York and Los Angeles release dates and scheduled a royal premiere in London for the end of the year. In Peter O’Toole’s opinion, it was a masterstroke. “David and I had begun to forget we were making a film,” he admitted. “After two years it had become a way of life.” But the director was furious and accused the producer of “sacrificing the quality of the picture.”

Lean and Spiegel had a pre-dinner meeting in Almería, Spain, on May 21. At first, Spiegel tried the “Baby, you’re overtired” routine. He argued that Lean should hand over the “big action stuff” to the second units, which would save both time and money. But the director hated second units and was violently opposed to the idea that the second-unit directors would be “staging the big action scenes while I sit in the hotel.” Spiegel realized that the argument was going nowhere and suddenly started to shout, telling Lean that he—Spiegel—was a ruthless man and was going to be ruthless with him. At the climax of Spiegel’s rage, he bent over Lean, red in the face, and bawled, “Perfidious Albion!” The next morning, Lean informed the second-unit directors “that under pres-sure of time and money” he was going against everything he had said and would allow them to shoot “a certain amount of film.”

Throughout the editing process, the partners were barely on speaking terms. “It was like a marriage that had run its course,” Norman Spencer sensed. “Even if Sam did something good, David wouldn’t realize it at the time and there were daggers drawn.” As a peace gesture, Spiegel invited Lean to dinner at the Berkeley, one of the director’s favorite London restaurants. But after a couple of drinks, Lean decided to let Spiegel have it—how it could have been “a very happy picture,” but most of the time it was not, because of the producer’s cables, messages, and general behavior. “You were absolutely horrible,” Lean said. “Why did you behave so badly to me?” Spiegel took “a great gulp,” then replied, “Baby, artists work better under pressure.”

Spiegel was intent on making Peter O’Toole the focus of *Lawrence of Arabia’*s American promotion, and consequently he refused to fly Omar Sharif to the U.S. But O’Toole balked when he heard the plan. “He said, ‘Bollocks,’ and he meant it,” Sharif recalled. “‘Omar is going and we’re going together.’” It was fortunate that the Egyptian actor was included, since he was a great asset to the campaign, winning over reporters everywhere, whereas O’Toole behaved disgracefully, leading Spiegel to remark, “You make a star, you make a monster.” When the blond leading man wasn’t giving interviews while drunk, he was demanding outrageous sums for appearing on television.

Lawrence of Arabia received 10 Oscar nominations. A few hours before the ceremony, Sharif went to Spiegel’s suite in the Beverly Hills Hotel. “The only sure thing, that year, was that I was going to get the Academy Award,” Sharif said. “David told me, ‘Now, Omar, when they call your name, I want you to walk slowly up the aisle, like you did in the film—don’t rush, don’t run.’ ... Sam said, ‘Baby, walk slowly.’” The actor was so prepared that as soon as Rita Moreno started reading the nominees, he got off his chair. “I was walking slowly, as David had told me. Then she said Ed Begley.”

Lean ended up winning, as did Spiegel. With his third Academy Award, Spiegel was treated with even more respect in the film community. The picture was a hit and would eventually gross $70 million. But the “uncrowned prince” of Columbia had changed. “He changed after what may turn out to be one of the best movies of all time,” said director Mike Nichols. “Everything changed.” Before that, Nichols sensed, Spiegel had been “the very soul of true ideas in a movie.... He was as close to an artist as a producer could get.”

After an extraordinary 10 years of producing, Sam Spiegel floundered. “People get corrupted,” Barry Diller said. “They don’t lose their brains. God knows they don’t lose their talent. But success ... removes their objectivity, it removes their instinct.” Spiegel went on to make films of interest—The Chase, The Night of the Generals, Nicholas and Alexandra, The Last Tycoon, and Betrayal—but nothing to compare with his earlier triumphs.

Spiegel’s genius for life never failed him, however. When he entered a restaurant, waiters hovered. He was always surrounded by a bevy of beautiful young women, and when he sat down he never looked to see if the chair was there. He presumed it would be, and it was. His enthusiasm for food continued, and he was capable of flying to London on a moment’s notice for a special at the Connaught Hotel.

In many respects, Malahne became a never-ending Spiegel production. The boat was old-fashioned by today’s standards, but possessed a majestic charm. Stepping onto Malahne was like stepping into another era. “There was such comfort,” said George Stevens Jr. “It was beautifully done—caviar, pâté, great wines, bullshots served in alabaster goblets.”

The stories from Malahne—both true and apocryphal—became a staple of gossip and the stuff of stand-up comedy. Some tales were dark, leading to the boat’s being called the “floating ship of evil.” But Malahne also became synonymous with the Cannes Film Festival, and even appeared on the cover of Life magazine under the heading “Luxury and Languor of Riviera Yachting.”

It was where the stars rubbed shoulders with the aristocracy and the super-rich. As a result, there were the occasional odd incidents. Brigitte Bardot was introduced to Edward Heath, and the former British prime minister was clueless about who she was. One Italian aristocrat had never heard of his lunch partner: Greta Garbo.

Spiegel was capable of great kindnesses to his lady friends such as Bettina Graziani, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Slim Hayward, and Leonora Hornblow. “He was very important to them when the worst things happened in their lives,” Nichols said. “He had great sympathy with the swans who were left.” When Slim Hayward’s husband, Leland, publicly deserted her, Spiegel took the time and trouble to look after her. He also dared to tell her a few home truths, which no one else did. “Slim, everybody in the world knows Leland’s going to marry Pam [Churchill, later Harriman],” he said. “She’s told everybody, and he’s told everybody.”

He was less gracious to another kind of female company, however. Lauren Bacall had been on Malahne when Spiegel had “this little girl” who was “so intimidated” that she never knew how to behave. “Then she left and Sam had another little girl who arrived!” “There was a certain amount of thinness and meanness around the edges,” said Nichols. “Like the semi-hooker who dropped a cushion in the ocean by mistake and was made to get off the boat. She had to leave at the next port of call because of his cushion.”

Spiegel was a social fixture throughout the 1970s. Included on Katharine Graham’s exclusive guest list, he became a pal of Linda Ronstadt’s (Spiegel took the singer and her mother to the ballet), and Malahne became just as associated with New Hollywood as it had been with the old. According to Nichols, the producer was “like the head of the family.” “Jack [Nicholson], Warren [Beatty], Anjelica [Huston], and me. That’s spanning a lot of different kinds of people, careers, and lives.” Warren Beatty wrote the first draft of Shampoo on the boat, and Jack Nicholson used to refer to Spiegel as “my main man.” When ordering suits from John Pearse, his British tailor, Nicholson referred to the cut of Spiegel’s jackets. “Nicholson liked the way that Spiegel’s shoulders were always soft and sloping,” recalled Pearse. “During fittings, he used to say, ‘Gimme Sam’s shoulders.’”

David Geffen—then a record producer—was also part of Spiegel’s inner circle. “He used to refer to me as ‘darling boy.’” Spiegel became “a kind of role model” for Geffen. Spiegel was determined to convert his “darling boy” to a suit and tie. “He always told me that if I wanted to be a big success I had to dress like a big success.” The lectures came to an abrupt halt, however, when Geffen informed Spiegel that he was wealthier than Spiegel was. “He couldn’t understand how you could make more money with records than you could with movies.”

During one voyage, Geffen got into trouble with Spiegel when he told Irene Mayer Selznick, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer and former wife of David O. Selznick*,* to “fuck herself.” First, Spiegel called to check if his “darling boy” had really said this. Geffen admitted that he had. “She was driving me crazy,” he explained. “And Sam said, ‘Darling boy, she drives everyone crazy. You must apologize. You’re on my boat and you must apologize.’ I did, and it was an unpleasant encounter with Irene for the entire cruise. We actually became quite good friends, but she was incredibly domineering.” Selznick wrote a letter to Spiegel insisting that she had done her “best not to be Mrs. Danvers [the sinister, omnipresent housekeeper in Rebecca],” and all had worked out well, “despite David’s distinct lack of charm.”

In the summer of 1983, Spiegel sold Malahne to Sheikh (Adel) Al Mojil. The widow of director William Wyler may have summed up this decision best when she said, “Poor Sam, he has this expensive boat and half his life is spent searching for guests.” With its teak decks and topless sunbathing, the yacht remained glamorous, but the casting had slipped a notch. “Sam did get very involved with the Eurotrash, which was very boring, since they only seem to find themselves interesting,” said the interior designer Joan Axelrod. As his health declined, Spiegel continued to socialize and even made efforts to start another picture, but he was increasingly obsessed with death and trying to avoid it. “I believe in mortality but not inflicting it on myself,” he once said. He used to tell his secretary, “I will give you $80 million if you could take me back 40 years.”

Spiegel never fully recovered from an operation to have a 20-gram benign prostate growth removed in December 1985. Against his doctor’s advice, he flew from London to New York and then went alone to St. Martin, in the French West Indies, where he died in a bathtub on New Year’s Eve. Joseph Mankiewicz recognized the irony of Spiegel’s dying “on the night that he was famous for, long before he was known as an excellent producer.” Yet, all things considered, it’s difficult not to agree with David Geffen, who said, “Sam had a great life. It wasn’t as if he ever had to cut down on his cream.”